Plot: Literate perv marries (and kills) landlady to get at her daughter.

Why it's on the list: This novel has a reputation as a "dirty book" that it doesn't really deserve; its storied buzz is hotter than the text itself, which is why it doesn't even make our top 10. There is an incandescent bit of frottage (French for dry hump where one partner is unaware of the other's excitement, usually conducted on subways) but the novel is a tale of hotels and guest cottages that Nabokov wrote on the back of 3 x 5 index cards as he and his wife traveled across America in search of butterflies. We've never been able to look at an index card the same way again.

Excerpt: By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. It was no easy matter to divert the little maiden’s attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter -- and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion.